Backlinks May Be Hurting Your Dental Search Engine Optimization

Dental search engine optimization is a key component of drawing the patients YOU want to attract to your website. The better you use keywords and keyword phrases that will attract good prospects, the higher your dental practice will show up on search engine results pages (SERPs).

One good way to boost your results on those SERPs is to have other websites link to your website. A link from another website to your website is called a “backlink.”

This works because Google says it views a backlink “from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B.”

So, the more links there are to your dental website across the World Wide Web, the higher the probability that prospects will arrive on your page.

More importantly, backlinks contribute to your ranking on SERPs. That is where you really get big results.

Search engines send out programs (called web crawlers or spiders) to index all the information on every web page on the internet. What these spiders determine about your backlinks plays a huge role in how easily prospective patients can find you.

First, any backlinks should be from high-quality, high-ranking websites. The higher the page rank of the site linking to you, the more value Google will place on that link. The more valuable the link, the higher your own page rank will be.

Second, the sites linking to yours should have something to do with dentistry or your physical location. You might have inbound links from specialists if you have a general practice. Alternatively, you might be a specialist with inbound links from general practices or specialists working in other areas.

Finally, backlinks should have some context about what the link means. For instance, rather than having a link like this:

Contextual linking boosts the value of the link by informing search engine spiders of what the linked-to page is about. It can be a good way to increase your page rank, as well as ensuring that your site is indexed correctly.

Good Backlinks Vs. Bad Backlinks

Good backlink policies ensure you get a true boost to your SERP position. It helps to consider that search engines are able to recognize a lot of things we wouldn’t think they would. For example, we already know spiders quickly identify instances of keyword stuffing, or using a disproportionately high number of keywords without concern for the quality of the copy.

Web crawlers also can determine if a site is authentic or lacks credibility. For example, if a site that has nothing to do with dentistry or with your physical location links to your site, the search engines will see that and will usually disqualify it from positively affecting your SERP rank.

You should view your backlink locations in terms of their value. When they are valuable, they boost your rank and when they are not, they can actually decrease your rank.

One final note on backlinks: If you want to be sure to get this sort of powerful backlinking, you must never purchase the link. Backlink creation should be done only through a collaborative agreement, professional connections, or formal arrangements with other websites and professionals in your industry.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Establishing and creating legitimate backlinks is time-consuming and requires a lot of interaction and exchanging ideas and information.

But it is a proven winner, so we emphasize it as part of our industry-leading Patient Attraction System™.

To learn more about our system, feel free to look around our website or click here to see the results we’ve achieved for hundreds of dentists across the country. When you’re ready to see what our Patient Attraction System™ can do for your practice, contact us at (888) 741-1413 or click here.

READY TO THRIVE?

If you’re ready to begin getting the only result that matters from your marketing - more and better patients in your chairs - get started today and schedule your Practice Discovery Session™. They’re free to serious dentists who want to see a Patient Attraction System™ that can double or even triple their practice.

SmartBox™, Colin Receveur™, Patient Attraction System® , Attract The Patients You Want®, Helping Dentists Thrive®, More and Better Patients® , More Patients, More Profits, More Freedom® , Patient Attraction Turbo Booster®, Practice Discovery Session™, RAVE™, State of Web Marketing®, The Coming Dental Apocalypse™, The Four Horsemen of Dentistry™, We Help Dentists Thrive®, and Zetetics® are all trademarks/servicemarks or registered trademarks/servicemarks of SmartBox, LLC, with all rights reserved. Any other business names or branding such as “Google”, “Bing”, “BirdEye”, “Inc 5000”, etc. are trademarks and/or servicemarks of their respective owners. No infringement is intended.